Sunday, 5 June 2016

For the last few days I've been at the Warsaw Workshop on Non-Standard Dark Matter. It's been very enjoyable! Plenty of interesting ideas, coffee, and social events. Yesterday I gave a short talk, trying to make the case for a dark matter direct detection search for the sidereal modulation signature. The general idea is that, if dark matter has self-interactions, the dark matter wind which strikes the Earth will interact with any Earth-captured dark matter, leading to a non-trivial spatial distribution which terrestrial detectors traverse throughout the day. I share the slides below this post. If nothing else you should click through to see some entertaining magnetohydrodynamic simulation animations!

By the way, as of this writing ATLAS+CMS have recorded about 2+2/fb of data (or 20 diphotons in alternative units):

We're quickly moving toward the position we were by Christmas last year (about 3+3/fb including the CMS $B=0$ data). If the 750 GeV diphoton resonance prevails in the new data we hope to know by the ICHEP on August 3-10. Some authors have taken to calling the would-be particle Ϝ, which is the archaic Greek letter "digamma" -- very fitting! We will see yet if this name becomes lore... I also quite like the following perhaps future update of the PDG from Strumia:

About Me

Jackson Clarke, PhD candidate in phenomenological particle physics at CoEPP, University of Melbourne. Collider phenomenology, neutrino masses, and some naturalness. Science enthusiast, among many other things. Blogging accordingly.

Views are my own. Content very definitely skewed by my own leanings and by papers getting attention. So it goes.